SolusOS 2 Alpha 7 Previews Its GNOME Fork

Announced last week was a new fork of GNOME Classic as the Consort Desktop. Released today by the Linux distribution behind this project, SolusOS, is the first alpha version of their next Linux release that integrates this forked GNOME desktop.

SolusOS 2 Alpha 7 was announced today as the first release to demonstrate the Consort Desktop. Consort is still in its early stages and quite similar to the GNOME Fallback mode at its last-maintained state, but the project is gaining some attention and seems like it will be moving forward at least for the near term.

What the SolusOS developers hope out of Consort is that it will "eventually be a distro-agnostic desktop environment providing the classic experience of GNOME 2 in a GTK3 environment."

Aside from introducing Consort, SolusOS 2 Alpha 7 also is shipping with Firefox 18.0, LibreOffice 3.6.4, and Thunderbird 17.0. SolusOS 2 is currently based upon the Linux 3.3 kernel but with modifications like shipping the BFS scheduler (Brain Fuck Scheduler) and enabling no-dyn-ticks, preempt, etc.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.